Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception (review)

148 Reviews Amongst the most dreaded are notarial archives. W e are especially indebted, then, to gallant researchers, such as Griffin, who have survived their labours in these mines and have brought back for us cargoes of the treasure they have extracted. Yet that is only part of his achievement. This is also a major work of bibliographical history. Three of the eight chapters deal with the Crombergers' books: tides, types, ornamental material, and so on. There is an index of editions and, finally, there are 1600 pages of bibliographical information on microfiches. The book is expensive but, in view of what it delivers, it is not exorbitant, and it will last. If ever there was a definitive work, this is it. G.B. Harrison Department of History University of Sydney Gurevich, A., Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. M . Bak and A. Hollingsworth, Cambridge, C.U.P., 1988; pp. xx, 275; R.R.P. A U S $99.00. This is an interesting, ambitious but, it seems to me, ultimately rather oldfashioned and unsuccessful book. There is plenty of interest excited by the author. In his useful introduction Peter Burke refers to Aron Gurevich, Professor at the Institute of General History, Academy of Science, Moscow as 'one of the most gifted historians at work in the U.S.S.R. and one of the most original medievalists anywhere in the world.' Gurevich explains his methodology in the foreword. He believes in systems and likes simple dichotomies. In his earlier book Categories of medieval culture he describes himself as guided by the notion that 'medieval man' is a valid abstraction for scholarly inquiry. (Unselfconscious sexism is one of the minor irritants of the book). I find myself quite out of sympathy with any scholarly enterprise resting on such a notion. Gurevich claims to be able to differentiate in this new study between elite and common culture. The whole book is an attept to wrest a coherent account of popular culture from literary sources created by an intellectual elite. Gurevich's debt to Annaliste historians is clear but, unlike these French historians, Gurevich seems naively confident in discovering a layer of popular culture over a period of some ten centuries seemingly undifferentiated across the myriad cultural and geographical niches of western Europe. And it is western Europe which Gurevich explores, and a rather familiar western Europe at that: Caesarius of Aries, the Dialogue on Miracles of Caesarius of Heisterbach, penitentials, the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, the Elucidarium of Honorius of Reviews 149 Autun, Hincmar of Rheims, Dante's Divine Comedy. These are hardly new and exciting sources and, despite his claims to the contrary, Gurevich does not use them in ways that are particularly original. The central theme of the book is the intertwining of the religious and secular world view. Gurevich makes the quite unwarranted assumption that 'popular culture' was more or less non-Christian. But his analysis of the audience of these various texts is based more on wishful thinking than any real analysis. To give just one example, Gurevich compares the theology and Weltanschaung of Honorius of Autun's Elucidarium and Anselm's Cur Deus Homo?. H e argues that Honorius demonstrates a 'popular' assumption of predestination and tension between good and evil, God and the devd, the saved and the damned. Anselm's more benevolent God is, by way of contrast, assumed to be representative of a mere elite scholarly view. Gurevich does not know the work of Valerie Flint on Honorius, but airily claims 'Nothing is known for certain about the environment in which Honorius lived and wrote, or about his social origins'. Nor does he have the theological expertise to link Honorius with the well documented rise in the fear of the devil from the twelfth century, which seems to have arisen partly as a response to the threat of Catharism, rather than with some mythical popular theology. In fact Catharism, and all other religious movements, seem to be discounted by Gurevich as comprising popular culture. Hence, although w e have saints and miracles, there are no pilgrimages, flagellants or heretics. The assumption that at the popdar level men (Gurevich generally...